Lost in the Desert: Accepted

As noted, November was an exceptionally good writing month for me. Well, in an additional bit of good news for December, one of those November stories, Lost in the Desert, has been accepted by Eternal Haunted Summer ( https://eternalhauntedsummer.com/ ) for their Winter Solstice 2023 issue. At 3,500 words, this also happens to be the meatiest story I’ve had accepted by the magazine in question.



Lost in the Desert is a folklore-heavy and atmosphere-heavy piece of Horror. Apart from the folklore research I had to do, the story owes itself to two major pieces of inspiration:




Sand, by Algernon Blackwood (1912). Blackwood is a truly magnificent evoker of literary atmosphere, and has taught me that taking your time and building the ‘feeling’ of a setting can pay dividends. In Blackwood’s case, his atmospheric abilities even served to hide his plot weaknesses, and Sand – an actual novella – is one of those texts that is longer than it needs to be.



An Overly Sarcastic Productions video on Marco Polo ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Rhr6SzloRo&t=540s ), which around 7:55 – 8:10 talks about the resonance of desert sand sounding like ghosts.




The story also gender flips a very famous Slasher Movie convention.